


Proserpina

by SharpestRose



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types, Hannibal Rising (2007)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-12
Updated: 2013-04-12
Packaged: 2017-12-08 06:08:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/757972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestRose/pseuds/SharpestRose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is always winter, where Hannibal lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Proserpina

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [普罗塞尔皮娜 (Proserpina by SharpestRose)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/759406) by [iamclx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iamclx/pseuds/iamclx)



It is always winter, where Hannibal lives.

The snow is never black, not even at night, because out in the woods the stars and moon are bright, so bright. The snow is never black but the woods are, the branches are. The trees are black and they loom, and smell like the cold. It was the smell of the desolate snowy winter that gave Chanel Number Five its particular piquant edge. One of her lovers was Russian nobility, cast out into the world by genocide and war, and he remembered that smell.

Hannibal was nobility once, but that was before the winter, and it is always winter now. 

The winter smells vast and delicate and lonely, like the palaces Hannibal has built within it. No matter how many golden windows he imagines into being, those beckoning rectangles of light in the limitless black, the snow is still the silver-grey of moonlight and the trees are always shadows, twisted and rustling in a wind that howls across the spaces where no branches catch it in their claws. The wind howls and howls and howls.

The gardens are buried under the snow, naturally. Fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, these are summer foods. In winter, well. In winter there are other things to eat. 

In those buried gardens Hannibal imagines the ghosts of eggplants, the echoes of sun-warmed dark purple skin that his sister loved to pat with her tiny baby palms, the fingers splayed out like the light-points of a star as she gave her benediction to the vegetable garden. 

Hannibal himself has always been partial to the colours of pomegranates, each little pearl of fruit within the rind catching the light individually, like a shard of coloured glass. A drop of blood. Hannibal appreciates complexity. 

Will Graham is a very complex creature indeed. Icarus, perhaps: a boy given wings and a prison, both from the same genius inventor. The minotaur’s teeth if he stays, the long burning plunge to drowning death if he goes. 

_Homo sacer_ can be translated from the Latin as either “the sacred man” or “the cursed man”. To be gifted so divinely was to be both these things at once. Hannibal has always appreciated the deceptive simplicity of the classics. Such hidden artfulness deserves respect.

Modern minds have their virtues too, of course. _He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you._ Nietzsche. Nietzsche, who once suggested that the death of God had made gods out of His murderers, in order that they might be significant enough to accomplish such an act. 

Hannibal is amused, but not especially impressed, by such philosophical ramblings. After all, the death of the powerful — even a system as powerful and pervasive as the concept of God — does not require a powerful murderer. The smallest and meanest and most worthless of men might kill a little girl, and in that death murder the whole universe. It takes so very little to destroy the world.

But Nietzsche was quite right. Now that God is dead and gone, a way must be found to shift the corpse, or else humanity must learn to live happily in the ruins. Hannibal quite likes the decor of the sepulchre. The high curved beams of God’s bleached ribcage, exposed to the sun and the elements. This is the palace in the snow.

Hannibal will lead Will here, careful step by careful step, for the ground is soft and gives way easily under heavy footfalls. Here in the snow, the glittering white of the winter days and the silvery shadows of the night. Where there are the ghosts of pomegranates to eat, and the echoes of a little girl’s laughter buried deep in the vegetable garden, down where the seeds dream of warm dirt. 

One day, when they have lived there a long, long time, in that palace where the golden light of windows is a false light and Icarus crouches perched on the edge of the labyrinth walls, waiting for the dawn to come so that he might take flight, one day Hannibal is going to ask the question that isn’t a question at all, but rather a secret. This is the secret to how to stop the snow from being white, even when the stars are out.

_“Ever seen blood in the moonlight, Will? It looks quite black.”_


End file.
